Hey Leets, I'm a non-traditional (no CS degree) Lead Software Developer at a large IT company in the Midwest for almost 9 years. Originally, I was hired because they asked, can you build websites? and I said, of course because I had been a Front End Developer ever since I build my first website in High School. Fast-forward to today and I'm a Lead SD with two SE direct reports. My team was originally only me at first, so I had to learn a lot on my own and become a Full Stack Developer, Production Owner, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Code Reviewer, Mentor, and Babysitter over the years. It has made me well-rounded but I'm overdue for a new challenge and want to go West.
Ironically both Facebook and Amazon contacted me over Linkedin for an interview last month after my 40th birthday, yes I'm old balls. I was confused and flattered at the same time as I've never been contacted by a FAANG company before, let alone two in the same month. I agreed to do both initial phone interviews and the FB tech recruiter asked some basic JS and CS questions because everybody should have a CS-first mindset at Facebook. I stumbled a little through the questions because it had been 4 years since I last did a formal interview for an internal position. The odd thing was when I asked, FB didn't have a public job posting they were interviewing me for, they were just wanting to hire a lot of JavaScript Devs by EOY and get them in their Bootcamp. She said it's up to me when I wanted to schedule the technical interview. 1 month later, 2 months later... she also wanted to make sure I studied and even said to try to interview somewhere else first. Made sense but thought it was weird for a recruiter to say that. The Amazon tech recruiter didn't even ask anything technical, she told me about the SDEII role and said you'd get an email to schedule your technical interview later today. After getting a false sense of being wanted on the market, I'm now feeling like I have imposter syndrome as I start to study hard on LC for my Amazon interview this week! I've solved a couple of medium questions with JS because this last year because I fell in love with Node.js and developed two complex Discord bots in my spare time so JS is my jam right now but Data Structures? Algorithms? Time & Space Complexity? WTF is that?
Do I think I can work at a FAANG company and be a valuable team member? Of course I can.
Do I think I can pass a technical interview right now that's based on CS questions? Hell no.
I'm thinking of delaying my interviews, buying premium, and knocking out as many questions as I can for a month before interviewing. Thoughts? Suggestions?
*FB & Amazon have 18 month and 6 month cool downs for rejected canidates to interview again.